The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding by Eric Nelson (review)

Of the making of post-Whig interpretations of history, there seems to be no end, less because there exist coherent opposites to a coherent “Whig interpretation” than because the meanings of such terms as Whig and Tory, both as they were and as they are now used, are seen to have changed and be still changing in so many ways. In this brilliant study, Eric Nelson takes up the implications of Lord North’s remark that the American claim to be responsive to the authority of the Crown of Great Britain but not to that of Parliament was a “Tory” argument and shows it to have been not only antiparliamentarian but also radically monarchist until rejected by the Crown and by George III himself. Nelson pursues the implications in the historiography of the eighteenth century and shows that historians of the time came close to a royalist reading of the English Civil Wars.

However, Tory as North used the word implied such a reading less than it did an endorsement of Bolingbroke’s argument, made forty years before, that a “patriot king” might assert his authority against that of a “corrupt” Parliament. It was therefore not an assertion of monarchy patriarchal or by divine right so much as a renewal of the complaint of post-1688 “Tories” that the regime set up by William III and the Hanoverians gave the king’s ministers control over patronage on a new and huge scale—a control they might use to corrupt Parliament and override the king himself. To this complaint, ministers and their supporters replied by terming themselves “Whigs,” meaning supporters of the revolution of 1688, and by using the undoubted Jacobite affiliations of most “Tories” to suggest that these aimed at restoring monarchy as practiced by Charles I and James II (as they certainly did not). From these historical confusions, there followed a series of historiographical ones. Some “Tories” stressed the independence of Parliament from the Crown and its ministers so far that the “Tories” began to sound (as Bolingbroke sometimes had) like the “republicans” who were to be found on the antichurch Left of the “Whig” persuasion. Here we may find the explanation of the comparative ease with which the American arguments termed “Tory” by North could be perceived as “republican,” but this does not explain how they actually became so.

To understand how, we must join Nelson in pursuing the changing image of that confused but well- meaning man George III. As a young king, he hoped to free the monarchy from the oligarchy of the “Revolution Whigs” and at times sounded like Bolingbroke and was accused, like him, of betraying the revolution. George III seemed to resist the “Whig” control of patronage by employing the patronage powers of the Crown, with the result that there sprang up among “Whigs” a renewal of the originally “Tory” rhetoric about “corruption” (Edmund Burke maintained this accusation for the rest of his life). But at the same time it emerged—as was clear to most analysts of the time—that the authority of the Crown and that of Parliament were now inseparably incorporated with one another, with the momentous result that the argument of the colonies that they were under the Crown alone could no longer be maintained and that George III (if he ever understood it) must be the first to reject it (as he did). Nelson’s book studies both the depth and persistence of the royalist case in American argument and the speed and completeness—perhaps a consequence of the depth to which it had been accepted until the king rejected it—with which it was abandoned and denounced.

Nelson concludes by asking whether the US presidency is a simple product of the republican separation of powers or whether the White House makes Washington a palace city: a set of architectural arrangements for providing counsel to the prince and access to his person. So, at least, I read Nelson...